ecomputerman wrote:What is the purpose of this forum? Customer comments are all complaints. Net 10 replies are always about contacting offline. How are we going to learn anything? Why don't you answer questions on this forum?
I agree, doesn't NET 10 understand what a forum is? Most forums answer as many questions as possible publicly, so everyone can benefit from answers to simple or common problems. As an example, from the number of forum threads to the effect of "Can't buy time on website", "Can't buy phone on website" it looks like NET 10 recently had website problems. In a real forum, the admins would post a sticky (a post that stays at the top) with an announcement that the website is undergoing maintenance or whatever, with updates every few hours until the site was back up again, and perhaps a suggestion to buy a phone or time at a local retailer in the meantime.
Instead of having to handle each of those posts individually, you'd free up a lot of people to handle the problems that absolutely have to be handled on an individual basis by a human being.
Thanks to another user, who posted the answers to a few of the easy questions about my new LG phone, I was able to quickly find out the reason my LG would not connect to the web was because the microSD card I had put in was an 8GB, and this particular phone only wants to work if a 4GB microSD is installed. Customer service has probably been telling people that information individually, when it could have been done much more quickly and easily by using the forum as a forum, rather than a Complaint desk where every question is answered with the same infuriating message: "Hi my name is NET person, we're going to take this offline. I'll send you a private message because we don't have a clue what a forum really is, and we think our customers are too stupid to read an explanation of a simple problem."
There will always be problems that do need private, individual responses, but if you look at any other tech related forum, the majority of user posts are simple questions about basic functions not covered in the manual. Often, other users will provide those answers, so everyone gets the help they need, faster, because Customer Service isn't wasting time answering the same simple question over and over and over, while people sit on hold for hours, getting more and more aggravated. When customers get answers quickly and easily, they are happy customers. When the more serious problems are able to be handled without leaving people on hold for an hour, those customers are happier too, and don't take their anger out on Customer Service reps, so your employees even get to be happier about their jobs.
Please consider hiring an experienced forum administrator to run your forum. It will pay off in ways you can only imagine.
Xencindy